Nailing the Nurburgring

We were pretty excited about our road trip from Berlin to the South and back - and the Nurburgring was to be the first stop. But first I had to create a Nerd-burg map with colour coded pages - yellow being the first day.
We picked up our Ford focus diesel and set off on the autobahn with a cruising speed of 140-160km/h. It was kind of embarrassing as VW campers were passing me and looked a bit pissed that I was slowing down the slow lane.
The autobahn is pretty amazingly efficient as all German inventions seem to be - the idea behind it is that if you are doing 200kmh the chances of you being overtaken are slim, so you can concentrate on the blurring road ahead. Perhaps it is also designed to keep you awake on the long open highways. Our Sat Nav tried to get us to cross meadows and pull handbrake turns at 100mph so the nerd map paid off in dividends. We pulled into Nurburg after 5 1/2 hours of driving and almost 700kms.. with the little diesel returning 5 litres per 100km - pretty incredible 'efficiency'.

We checked into our guesthouse called Pension Muhlenhardt which has a view up to the Nurburg Castle and is surrounded by amazing green hills and the track close by!

Here's the view from our balcony.

The next morning I woke up to the pitter patter of rain and dark heavy clouds outside. This is the day.. the one and only.. one of the most challenging tracks in the world to be noviced in the pouring rain! We jumped into the car and took off to RSR Racing - which have a whole range of cars that are track prepared for hire.. such as the Renault Clio Cup 197 I was to pick up.

Here is the rear end of my track toy for the 6 laps.

Their GT3, that you can hire, but may be better off doing a taxi lap in for 170euro
Note there is another right at the back that has been written off - I would hate to be that customer as you pay through the nose for excess - something along the lines of 25000Euro

Their back yard is full of cars that are privately owned and stored or for rent. This GT2 is used as a taxi.. apparently the owner is a wee bit scared of it.. and you would be with the widow maker legend this bloodline has.

The Alfa graveyard. This is how RSR came about as a racing team company, but as the years went by less people took the cars to the meets and opted to lease them instead. I personally love the GTV6 poking out - as I used to own one. The 75 shares all the same parts - so easy to gather spares.


These Prosports are for hire - you would have to be a brave brave man. I believe they are 3000Euro a day for the blast, but they wont let you out before a day of training.


Anyway..
Fortunately for me, there was a clerical error - and the public testing wasn't to start until 4pm as there was an event on. By this stage I had learned that the weather changes here remarkably quickly, and it was possible that it would clean up by 4pm.

Guess what? The weather cleared and the track dried up just for me! Chris at RSR offered to drive the first lap to teach me the lines and braking points (A very detailed robot-like instruction). We cruised the lap at no more than 70mph and at the end I was feeling ill... not because of any motion sickness or the like. No it was because of the terrifying nature of the track itself. Let me give you a small background to the creation of the Nurburgring;

The Nurburgring was designed by the Eichler Architekturbüro in the 1920s to show case German engineering and driver talent. In the 1960s Jackie Stewart called it 'The green hell', and in '67 Formula 1 was banned from it as it was deemed z track TOO DANGEROUS.
It is truly like a roller coaster ride that will test not only your commitment, memory and skill.. but your stomach too as you leap over a crest at 180kmh only to bottom out before a hairpin.
The track will tighten on itself where you least expect it to, and corners that look safe at speed will suddenly present their second tighter cousin metres later to shake the rear end loose.
For the first half of the lap you travel downhill constantly over 1000feet.. and then on the second half you climb it again. Corners change their banking from positive to negative and almost every next turn is hidden as a surprise for when you get there.

If you have ever played a game of golf, you will know that it is all in the swing. If you have a great technique you can hit the ball twice as far as someone using twice the power and a poor technique. That is exactly how you treat this track.
For the first 2 laps you just leave the car in 3/4/5 gear and concentrate on getting through smoothly and learning what you can. Then you build some confidence and gather some more speed as each lap progresses. Just before my last lap there was unfortunately a large accident and it took an hour to clear.. but with the time to clear the mind, I jumped back in the Clio and had such an amazing last lap.. apart form the occasional slow and fast traffic everything seemed to go right, and the track rewarded me with a superb drive. When I say superb, I was still a long long way off being quick.. but 20 more laps and I reckon I'd have it mastered, and the Porsche.

Me and the Clio heading out for a scorcher

I have never seen so many Porsches gathered like a bunch of mazdas in a supermarket lot.. they are just so normal to be here - but the attention was all for them still. Right here we have 3 GT3s together, and there were more.. oh yes there were more.

I got overtaken by a couple of these R8s - and I was truly afraid when they came into the rear view mirror to hunt me down.

Lovely UR quattro.. got eaten by the Clio though

The attention seeker of the day.. and in the BG was this skyline - one of about 3 here. They are terrifyingly fast on the track and just blur past you.


As a last story. There were a couple of jokers around - this starlet was one of them. The Germans tried everything to stop them from going on the track. First they were told to remove the roof racks - and then 4 Germans went around kicking bumpers to see if anything would fall off.. eventually they were allowed on to become a rolling road block.